I grew up in a suburb of Chicago. When you look on a map of this area all the crisscrossing lines that resemble roads are in fact roads. Hence my surprise when travelling in less populated areas of the country. Some things that appear to be roads on maps are little more than a well worn path through someone’s private property. Twisty and unmaintained. Not the kind of place someone from out of town driving an old mini van should be travelling after dark.

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Few years back, had some people ignore the warnings about unmaintained roads and get stuck out in the middle of nowhere. Made quite a stir as the father went for help and never made it. Rest of the family were discovered safe in the stuck car before hand.

*shakes fist at GPS/GogleMaps* Living in the woods means lots of delivery drivers being led to ruin by the siren song of Google insisting that a dirt path continuing into someone’s cow pasture behind a locked gate is TOTALLY a navigable road. We get FedEx stuck in a nearby chicken farm sometimes, because on that satellite map their private chickeny road (which only has a locked gate at ONE end) connects to our gravel County Road as the shortest route from the nearest town, and “Get Directions” defaults to the shortest route.

It gets even better – in Melbourne and other cities with a *lot* of fast-paced development, all forms of map are useless because they’re likely to either lead you to a road that has not been finished yet and you’ll have to drive through a tree to get to its other end, or the road hasn’t been built at all yet.
Or there was a road that could have gotten you there quicker but it’s not on the map yet.

@ Radical Edward: I thought so too until I found out that there’s another exoplanetary body that may about the size of Pluto or even larger, and it’s still inside of the Solar System, so unfortunately the sad reclassification of Pluto as a non-planet makes sense.